Plainview ISD searching to replace retiring superintendent

LUBBOCK — The longtime superintendent at Plainview Independent School District gave his school board plenty of notice of his intention to retire and it needed the time, said board President Brandon Brownlee.

Ron Miller will retire at the end of January after 11 years as superintendent and 40 years working for Plainview ISD.

“What I’ll miss most is the daily interaction with the kids,” Miller said.

Brownlee said board members have been searching for almost six months for the “right fit” to replace Miller.

Brownlee said the board started by surveying the community.

“We were actually able to get almost all of the civic clubs together one day for a meeting,” he said. “We had over a thousand surveys returned and actually about 50 of them were returned in Spanish. We were very impressed. Some of the best ones that we received were from high school students.”

The board also contracted with B.W.P. & Associates, a search firm that specializes in educational leadership. The firm assigned Felipe Alanis, a former Texas education commissioner and two former school superintendents to work with Plainview ISD on the search.

“They’ve been very integral, being more or less the clearinghouse,” Brownlee said. “Not only did they take applications, they recruited them.”

Plainview stopped taking applications on Oct. 29 and had 62 at that time.

Brownlee said the board reduced the pile of applications using the criteria drawn from its own list and the surveys.

“We took the group down to 15, then less than 10, which is when we started our interviews,” he said.

The next superintendent for the 5,800-student district will be the 17th, the outgoing superintendent said.

Miller said he was named superintendent on Dec. 1, 2002, the district’s 16th since 1911.

Miller was hired as a math teacher for Plainview High School in 1973 where he taught math and biology for four years. He was named a dean of the school — a role similar to assistant principal — then became the principal of College Hill Elementary School. He spent 16 years at College Hill, then four years as the district’s director of special services and a year as assistant superintendent for administration and personnel before being named superintendent of schools.

Miller said he passed on his love of education as a career. He has former students from his years as the College Hill principal who are now teachers at Plainview ISD. He also taught some of the administrators, not only at Plainview ISD, but at other districts of the South Plains as an adjunct professor at Wayland Baptist University.

He has laid the groundwork for the next superintendent, overseeing renovations to school facilities, including a new high school addition currently under construction.

“Also during my tenure as superintendent, salaries for paraprofessionals have doubled and salaries for teachers have gone up more than $10,000,” Miller said.

The school board is meeting in closed session at 6 p.m. Thursday to discuss the results of the search. Brownlee said an announcement of a “lone finalist” will not be made before the regular meeting Dec. 20.

Under Texas law, school districts are allowed to keep the names of all candidates confidential but must name a lone finalist 21 days before the candidate is actually hired.

“By state standards, we’re considered a poor school district (but) we feel that we’ve got a lot of the right ingredients to be a world-class school district,” Brownlee said. “The person that we choose is going to chart the direction of our district for easily the next 20 years.”